Check your power cables, ESPECIALLY if you’re using USB cables. Most of them are crap and will drop voltage like there’s no tomorrow under load because they are barely rated for 500mA. Just in case, use different cables for the two boards, or make your own sturdy cable and supply the RPi directly through the 5V pin on the header (be careful, it bypasses the polyfuse).
If said load is a current inrush (for example, when you are resetting the iC880A) the voltage drop might not even be visible on a multimeter, so if you have an oscilloscope at hand you should use that with a falling trigger at 4.5V or something.
Has an on-board 5.1V 3A voltage regulator which I was powering from a 12V 20A psu over POE so I’m confident that the gateway has more than enough ‘juice’ for its needs.
I switched the gateway off for 30 mins - when I powered it on, it started up straight away -
I will have to keep my eye on it - I don’t like not knowing what caused the failure in the first place.
I have the same board. one thing I noticed is that the small potentiometer is hard to adjust… and it is suggested that we make it permanent by putting a drop of silicon on it. Did you check the voltage while your ic880a wasn’t starting up? I didn’t… but I will be doing that if and when the problem surfaces again. Building 5 gateways in total and we need this stable before we put it out in the field…
Yes - I have a voltmeter connected to the 5V output on the backplane and it shows 5.1V.
The gateway still fails to start after a re-boot. I have to do the power off - wait - power on procedure each time. I don’t understand why the ic880a doesn’t respond to the RESET signal as it should.
Hi, I made those interface boards. A while ago I received a batch of pin headers (the 20x2 type) that seemed to make bad contact when stacked. I noticed it while testing the boards (I test every assembled board manually before shipping) and tried to replace all pin headers with good ones, but maybe some still slipped through. (I threw them all in the thrash now, to be safe ) .
You say that the same issue happens if you wire up the iC880A board with jumper wires. In that case this should not be the cause, but maybe it was just a coincidence?
Could you use this test script to turn on all LEDs and then wiggle around the board slightly to see if some of them turn on/off? If you have good connection between the pin headers, the LEDs should never flicker.
I tried your script and all the leds work fine and so does the button. Its difficult to ‘wiggle’ the backplane as its screwed down tight on standffs.
I have pin 22 (RESET) jumpered to the blue led so I know when the RESET pulse is sent but the ic880a doesn’t react to it at all.
I don’t think its a backplane or a hardware issue as exactly the same thing happens with my ‘test’ gateway which is just an RPi3B jumpered to an ic880a. When I re-boot, the ic880a fails to respond to the RESET signal and the gateway doesn’t start.
I have two batches of ic880s and so far it only did that on one (OLDER batch)… the other (belonging to a different/newer batch) is still alive… waiting for it to (knock on wood) ‘misbehave’. the one that ‘misbehaved’ before had # 0488 on the small square label and # 003609 on the large label ~13.2mm x 11.2mm. the NEWER batch that is still working have # 0038 on the small label and # 003892 on another, the label being ~13.2mm x 7.0mm. I’ll do some more tests (run the gateways in parallel to see if behavior is different for each one).
I’ve set the DEBOG_HAL to 1 and all I get is - 31.07.17 21:53:10 (+0000) ERROR: FAIL TO CONNECT BOARD
I don’t know how to do the last 2 steps - start the tool and log the output and “play” a little bit with this tool while logging the output. I can’t find these 2 directories in my resin build. Maybe they are not there and I need to adjust my /dev/build.sh file to get them complied - I don’t know.
The white labels on the board are Batch and Serial numbers.
Mine is 0350 and 003959 on one
and (can’t see it) and 003506 on the other.
I was asked for these when I opened a ticket.
In your log there is a pin 22 mentioned (physical pin), instead of 25 (gpio number of pin 22):
This is a part of the Resin.io log -
31.07.17 22:49:09 (+0000) [TTN Gateway]: Resetting concentrator on pin 22
31.07.17 22:49:10 (+0000) *** Multi Protocol Packet Forwarder for Lora Gateway ***
So I presumed that was the same configuration typo as I had, I changed in my configfile reset-pin 22 in reset-pin 25 and it worked like a charm
Can you find a non-LoRa way to toggle the GPIO pin up and down (from the raspberry pi) and confirm as far into the Ic880a board as you can that you see it go to a logical 0 and 1? (With a multimeter and the other lead going to a rPi ground.) Maybe its something easy like a loose solder joint somewhere. (It happens, especially with this sort of low volume stuff.)
I’d suspect easy things like voltages, physical connections, and such before suspecting higher levels like silicon being bad or software being bad. (Are you sure that power supply doesn’t have current limiting mode enabled? Have you take a multimeter to it and looked to see how much AC ripple is on it? How far down does the 5Vdc line go down when there’s load? (If at all.) )
I’m fairly certain the pin 25 is translated to the appropriate GPIO. (But adding that into the debug text output should have been done to avoid this kind of confusion…)
) .